Tag Archives: Family

There’s so much going on right now. Book ideas flying out at me from all sides, family drama, work, things to look forward to and things I’m dreading that sometimes I feel as though I’m being buried alive. No, this post isn’t all depressing and “poor me”. I’m actually okay with all the chaos that’s become my life. Apparently I’m the kind of person who thrives on pressure even as it gives me panic attacks.

I’m not entirely sure what this post is about to be honest. I started to go into my DJ spiel talking about the song I’m going to play when I began listening to it. Tool is one of my favorite bands of all time. I’ve loved their music since I was 16 and it never gets old. In fact, I find that as I get older, their songs mature with me giving me a different perspective and meaning. I used to love it just because it was kick ass and melodic and heavy. As I aged, I dug deeper into the lyrics and the meaning behind them and discovered a whole new reason to love them. I know, that makes me sound shallow, that I just liked them because they were different from the usual and heavy, but aren’t all teenagers about the surface anyway? Most of them at least.

But there’s a line in today’s song that just reaches out to me and it has been for several weeks. I don’t talk much about my very personal life because I try to keep everything on the light side, but without darkness there would be no light. Almost a year ago, my dad went into the hospital to have a tumor removed from his stomach. While he was recovering from surgery, he had a heart attack that landed him in CCU for fourteen days. We nearly lost him and then it was discovered he has stage 4 stomach cancer. Without getting into all the details, he isn’t taking any kind of chemo or other treatment. He’s doing okay for now, but we all know it isn’t going to last. It’s been a roller coaster my sister and I have been trying to cram as much time with him as we can.

So when I’m listening to this song and hear the line, “We are eternal, all this pain is an illusion”, it reminds me to live in the now, to accept everything as it comes and remember that this isn’t the end. All the stress of real life, writing life, family life, work, etc., all of it means nothing if I can’t appreciate the good that comes from all of it, to understand that the physical isn’t all we are. Yes, even my dad’s illness. The good is that it’s helped to brush aside a lot of negative things that have been stewing for a while, it’s brought me and my sister closer and us both closer to him. I think one of the hardest things for us all is to remember that each difficulty in life brings us one step closer to being the people we were born to be. Does that make sense?

Enough of all this rambling. I love Tool. I love this song. Hope you can appreciate it as much as I do!

Um, so it feels like forever since I blogged. For some reason, I just can’t seem to come up with anything interesting to write about in terms of me.

Are y’all still here? If so, thank you so much! How’s life been treating y’all?

You know how things just sort of go crazy. You have a set plan in place, a goal in mind that you’re bound and determined to follow and then BLAM! fate throws you a curveball? That’s what it’s been like for me. After the release of Touched by Lightning, I’ve been dodging curveball after curveball. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been ogling sexy men over on Facebook because y’all know that’ll happen no matter what.

But for about three months my creative energy was gone. Oh I tried to write, tried to pretend I was going to have a story finished by April and another finished in May. I even had a spreadsheet with all of my ideas and schedules planned out. Then real life intruded, bold and brash, bullying my muse. Between the EDJ and family crises, my muse was whimpering like a whipped puppy.

Things aren’t better, but they aren’t worse either. I’m starting to finally (slowly) get a handle on things. None of those things that’ve been holding me back have gone away. If anything, they’ve gone from schoolyard bullies to massive giants stomping all over everything, but my muse is fighting back. She wants to write stories with happy endings (and not just of the sexual kind heh). She wants to exert a little control over something even if it’s an imaginary world.

So saying that, I’ve just finished a short story for an upcoming box set called Brought to His Knees. I’m going into this awesome undertaking with ten other authors: A.M. Griffin, Amy Ruttan, Anya Richard, Sabrina York, Sayde Grace, Jennifer Kacey, Felice Fox, Cynthia d’Alba, Tina Donahue and Lynne Silver. I have to say, it’s pretty amazing what eleven determined authors can accomplish and I really think this box set will have something for everyone’s tastes. My contribution to this set is the next story in my Southern Sin series. Don’t worry, we’ll be having a huge book cover reveal and prizes and… you know what? How about y’all follow our Facebook page to find out what’s going on next? We’re having takeovers, giveaways, you name it and we have it 😉

And starting soon, possibly even today (shocker!) I plan to start a series that’s been driving me insane for the last two months. Maybe it has to do with all of the stress that’s built up since January, but I’m going dark and grim with this new series. Oh don’t worry, I still plan to write my shifters in the Cajun Heat series and stories in my Grand Terre world, but a writer’s got to write where the muse allows her, right? 😉

I’m going to try a lot harder to blog more often, but I’m not promising anything because when I do… 😉

I’m sure everyone is having that Meh feeling today. Not just because it’s Monday, but also because it’s the first Monday after the time change. Ugh, time changes. I hates them, precious. Why can’t they just leave well enough alone already? We’re nearing summer which means the days will be longer anyway, but no, they have to go and mess with our clocks too. I do not like leaving my house at dark to drive to work, y’all. Makes me feel like an overachiever.

*sniff*

But since I’m pretty sure everyone and their mother is complaining about the time change, I’ll leave it be.

I know I made a vow somewhere about blogging regularly. I really did mean to. Life just gets in the way and honestly, I don’t think y’all want to hear about my boring life, right? I mean, the most exciting thing to happen to me is my 2-year-old nephew claiming I’m the reason he’s cute. Which is totally true. *snort*

Oh, or how about I’ve been so enamored of my current characters that the minute my head hits the pillow I’m bombarded by scenes I want to write with them? They follow me into sleep and wake up with me, yet when I sit down to write, they won’t talk to me. That isn’t exactly true. I do write because they talk to me but I have to end up removing scenes because I only have 25k words to put their story together. If I went with their pace, we’d be looking at a 100k book. That actually might come later for another book in that series, but for now they need to buckle down, fall in love and get busy. Y’know?

What else? *think* Nothing else really. I’m just struggling to find enough time in the day to handle the evil day job, the writing, family time and sleep. Although that last part isn’t so hard to accomplish. It’s the getting up again in the morning that does it LOL

Got my hair colored to dark brown over the weekend and it wasn’t until I was getting dressed this morning that I realized I can now wear red shirts again. Yay! I miss wearing red. I gave them up when I went red because…well, it would’ve been overpowering so now that I’m no longer rockin’ the red hair…I can tear out the red shirts. Yay!

Okay, enough of that. We’re just two days away from the start of the 1,000 Blog Post Celebration. I have lots and lots and lots of prizes to give away to one lucky winner, so tell y’all friends about it. It’ll be pretty epic, I think.

As for the weekend, it was too short. When you spend most of the day at the salon and barely have time to do anything else, it pretty much mangled the rest of the weekend. At least it did mine. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy getting my hair done because my sister gets hers done as well which means two to three hours of laughing and cutting up and then a nice lunch somewhere and then shopping. We went to Ulta afterward and I’m now the proud owner of new perfume, new moisturizer, fingernail polish and a new makeup brush. And that’s because I wouldn’t let myself look at anything else while I was there.

Sunday was football and I’ll say it right now. When Greer went down with that…leg…thing, I had to get up and leave the room. Not change the channel until they stopped showing slo-mo shots of his knee snapping in the wrong direction. I left the room shuddering and cringing and basically empathizing more than I should. I can’t even close my eyes without seeing it. Meh.

So that was my weekend in a nutshell. Hope everyone had a good one as well and that they’re ready for the giveaway this week!

I’m going to keep today’s post short. Mostly because I forgot about it until just now. I know, I’ve become such a horrible blogger! But I have so much going on, it’s easy to forget a lot of things.

Like giving thanks to the people who serve and have served our country. I’m sure I might have mentioned this before, but a lot of men in my family have been in the military. My grandfather joined the Army Air Corp right before World War II and was actually on his way to Hawaii when Pearl Harbor was attacked. I don’t remember many of his stories except that he hated pineapples after his stint there and he got to dance with Grace Kelly for a few seconds as part of a USO show. I thought that was pretty awesome.

My stepfather’s dad did a stint in Europe at the same time. Normandy Beach and I remember sitting with him and listening to his stories although I couldn’t tell you what they were. I just liked to listen to him talk and look at his medals. I thought that was pretty awesome too.

My uncle was an MP in the Army, stationed in South Korea. He doesn’t talk much about those days, although I think whatever he saw and did over there eventually brought him happiness because he met his wife there. Sure, they’ve endured a lot since then, but they’ve always had each other and I think that’s amazing.

My stepdad joined the Navy when he graduated high school. He became a Seabee. I used to laugh at his stories because part of the basic training was swimming and he couldn’t swim. When it was his turn to dive into the pool and do his thing, he dove straight for the side and sort of floated until he got to the other side. He totally cheated, but he did his thing and went to Vietnam. I was lucky to have gone to his company reunion when I graduated from high school. I say lucky because I got to meet the men who were in the pictures he brought back from Vietnam with him, talk to the people he talked about rarely. And they were great. We watched old slide shows of the guys’ time there and listening to them rag on each other, get choked up about someone they lost…It was touching. It wasn’t the senior trip my fellow classmates had, but it gave me a new appreciation for our military.

They sacrifice so much for the citizens of our nation. They give pieces of their hearts, their souls to doing what so many of us wouldn’t even think about doing. And they do it with pride, honor. That’s something everyone should respect and be grateful for. Because while everyone is born to take, not all of us are born to give and that’s what our veterans and current service men and women do. They give and give.

So today, I’d like to give my thanks to them all. To the veterans who keep our history alive with stories they share with the next generations, to the families and friends who’ve lost loved ones fighting for freedom, to the men and women who are serving now, doing their best to keep us free, there aren’t enough words to thank you for what you’ve done. But you have my thanks all the same.

I’ve been such a bad blogger this year. I’m sure when I get to the last post of the year, I’ll think “But I didn’t blog much this year!” because I haven’t. Maybe it’s a natural part of diving deeper into my writing. Which I haven’t been doing. Or maybe it’s just laziness. Whatever it is, I do apologize for not blogging as much as I used to.

I’m trying to fix that. It might even be a New Year’s Resolution. Which I never follow anyway. Oh well, looks like y’all are out of luck!

This is going to be a busy weekend, by the way. This afternoon, I’m heading to Lake Charles, Louisiana for the Ellora’s Cave show and book signing with some great Cavemen. You can tell I’ve been waiting for this for a while, right? I was so concerned back when I found out when it was because of the shoulder. But I know if I can fly to Ohio to be crazy at RomantiCon, I can definitely cheer and go crazy over the dancers. *cough*

Once I get back to town tomorrow, I’ve got to jet to my nephew’s 2nd birthday party. He’s so darn cute I could just eat him up with a little spoon! I can’t be late for that, so chances are I’ll be sleep deprived when I get there tomorrow. Add onto that edits I’m expecting from my CPs and it looks like I won’t be getting any rest this weekend. But hey, how does that saying go? No rest for the wicked? And I can be very, very wicked when I want to. 😉

So to come back to the title of this post…Because tonight’s show is going to be hunky men doing their thing on the stage, it’s going to be great. And although this song is so played out because of Bridget Jones’ Diary and I think it was in Magic Mike as well, it’s perfect for the craziness that’s sure to go down tonight.

This is my Freaky on Friday song dedicated to the Cavemen show tonight. I hope to do a full RomantiCon blog post next week, so look for it!

I woke up this morning thinking…it really should be Sunday. Because there’s no way I’m ready for Monday to be here already. Not just because it’s the start of the work week, but because I’m still not ready for RomantiCon.

Okay that’s a lie. I’m mostly ready. I have everything I plan to wear put to the side waiting to go into the suitcase. I’m waiting to make absolutely sure I don’t change my mind before putting them in the vacuum packs and sealing them. By the way, if you travel and don’t want to lug around ten bags, those vacuum packs are lifesavers. I can fit my whole wardrobe in them. I’m hoping I can fit everything in one bag this year. With the still iffy shoulder, I don’t want to have to drag two big suitcases through the parking garage *shudder*

The rest of the weekend went well. I got my hair done on Saturday and then ended up shopping with my sister. She’s the worst sort of influence on me. Was it really necessary for me to buy another pair of shoes? Forget that the soles are made of memory foam and therefore are guaranteed to be comfy at the conference, did I really need another pair? Honestly! By the time I got home that afternoon, I was numb with fatigue and passed out for a couple of hours.

Did I feel guilty about that? Not really. Just like I didn’t feel guilty for watching football all day yesterday. All. Day. Why? Because on Friday evening, I wrote “The End” on “Touched By Lightning” (Working title) and sent it to my critique partners. And it’s probably a damn good thing I was book free this weekend. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy my nephew or realized that he’s the good luck guy for Saints games. When Bennett was at my house, we were kicking it. When he left, we weren’t. So my brother brought him back. And we won.

Yup, good luck guy.

So that’s my weekend. I’ll be mostly quiet this week because of the conference but I promise I’ll have plenty of stories to share when I get back!